Two days after an apparent assassination attempt against him, former President Donald J. Trump showed few signs on Tuesday that he would shake up his approach to campaigning.
At a town hall in Flint, Mich., for his first campaign event since the Sunday incident, he made grand promises to restore auto-making jobs to the state, the heart of the American auto industry, as he gave long-winded, often meandering responses to only a few questions.
To the extent that Mr. Trump was focused, it was on repeatedly vowing that his tariffs would revitalize the auto industry in Michigan, a crucial battleground state, and that a Trump loss in November would be catastrophic — referring to such an outcome as a “tragedy.”
Using the dire language he often uses to frame this election, he said if “we don’t win, there will be zero car jobs, manufacturing jobs.”
“It will all be out of here,” he said.
Speaking to thousands of supporters in the Dort Financial Arena in Flint, he also insisted vaguely that his tariff proposals would be enough to reverse a decades-long decline in the American auto industry and bring “so many auto plants” into the state if elected.
Mr. Trump’s propensity for lengthy answers that jump from topic to topic was often on display. Asked by a Ford employee about the threats to manufacturing jobs, Mr. Trump immediately responded by discussing the threat of nuclear war and climate change before talking about trade policy.
And while answering, he blamed China for the Covid pandemic and said he would meet next week with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a country he called “a very big abuser” of American trade policy.
Mr. Trump briefly recounted the incident on Sunday at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla., commending the Secret Service on its response to the second apparent attempt on his life while also saying he needed “more people” on his protective detail.
After two days in which he and his campaign have, without evidence, blamed Democrats’ language both for the shooting he survived in Butler, Pa., and for the incident on Sunday, Mr. Trump suggested that foreign nations upset with his trade proposals might be to blame.
After discussing his plan to put a 200 percent tariff on cars imported from Mexico, Mr. Trump said: “And then you wonder why I get shot at, right? You know, only consequential presidents get shot at. When I say something like that, you have countries saying, ‘This guy.’ But what can you do?”
Mr. Trump to some extent softened his criticism of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, thanking them for calling him after Sunday’s episode. Even as he described the conversations as “very nice,” the crowd erupted in a chorus of boos.
Over roughly an hour, Mr. Trump took just three questions from audience members and two from the town hall’s moderator, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, who more often made supportive statements that cleared the way for Mr. Trump to cycle through the same points that have animated his campaign.
Mr. Trump repeated his false insistence that he won in 2020, saying that “bad, bad things happened” that year, an allusion to his debunked claims of voter fraud. He insisted that he would curb inflation by raising U.S. oil and gas production, which has hit highs under the Biden administration.
As he was discussing energy policy, he at one point confused Bagram Air Base, which he makes central to his complaints about the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which he opened up to oil and gas development during his presidency.
“We have Bagram in Alaska,” he said while talking about energy. “They say it might be as big, might be bigger than all of Saudi Arabia. I got it approved.”
Seconds later, he seemed to realize his mistake and tried to correct course. “Check that one out, Bagram. Check that one out. It’s, it’s — no, think about this: Between Bagram, between — you go to ANWR, you take a look at the kind of things that we’ve given up. We should be — we should have that air base, we should have that oil.”
Later, Mr. Trump claimed that his remarks, which at rallies and town halls often veer off course, were not rambling but had been intentional. After falsely asserting that people do not leave his rallies, a rebuttal of a jab Ms. Harris made at their debate, he said, “I give these long, sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs, but they all come together.”
Mr. Trump’s event in Flint was his third town hall-style stop in three weeks. His campaign hosted one last month in Wisconsin that was moderated by Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman who recently endorsed him, and then Mr. Trump took part in another hosted by Fox News’s Sean Hannity in Harrisburg, Pa.
Michigan is a critical battleground state that both campaigns are eyeing as they look for a path to victory in November. Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, held an event in Western Michigan earlier on Tuesday. Ms. Harris will also visit the state on Thursday, when she takes part in a livestream with Oprah Winfrey.
Mr. Trump won Michigan in 2016 by less than 0.3 percent, then lost it by about 2.8 percent four years later. Polls have shown Mr. Trump losing ground in the state since Ms. Harris became the Democratic nominee.
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